When tobacco worked wonders

The British empire in North America was not founded in a fit of absence of mind, though it might be said, in its beginnings at least, to have represented the triumph of hope over experience. From the outset, King James I and his chief minister, Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, were sceptical. A royal charter was granted to the London Virginia Company in 1606 and a Royal Council appointed to oversee the trans-Atlantic adventure, but the king was interested only in grabbing the lion’s share of the profits that might accrue. Otherwise, as Cecil put it, the colonists were to be left on their own ‘unto the peril which they incur’.

The omens were bad. The massacre of Huguenot settlers in Florida in 1565, evidence of Spain’s determination to keep North America in its hands and free of Protestant heresy, had been followed by the disappearance without trace of the first English colony in North America, on Roanoke Island. Undeterred, three ‘great swans’ carrying about 100 Otasantasuwak, ‘the ones who wear trousers’, sailed into Chesapeake Bay in April 1607. They arrived in quest of precious minerals (silver from South America had enriched the Spanish monarchy in the previous century) and a route to the Indies. By 1609 they had found neither, while the settlers at Jamestown had endured privation and death, from Indian attacks and from disease and starvation brought on by one of the coldest winters on record and one of the driest summers. The government and the Virginia Company abandoned all thought of colonising Virginia. Jamestown was to become, on the model of the East India Company’s operations, a mere ‘factory’, or commercial depot, trading in timber and furs. The coronation of Powhatan, the native ruler of the region and father of Pocahontas, appeared to seal the matter by implying English recognition of his sovereignty over his lands.